But Volkonsky was more than a farmer; he was an agricultural institute. He imported textbooks and new types of seed from European Russia (Maria's letters home were filled with lists of gardening needs)
and he spread the fruits of his science to the peasants, who came to him for advice from miles around.89 The peasants, it would seem, had a genuine respect for 'our prince', as they called Volkonsky. They liked his frankness and his openness with them, the ease with which he spoke in their local idiom. It made them less inhibited than they normally were with noblemen.90
This extraordinary ability to enter into the world of the common people requires comment. Tolstoy, after all, never really managed it, even though he tried for nearly fifty years. Perhaps Volkonsky's success is explained by his long experience of addressing the peasant soldiers in his regiments. Or perhaps, once the conventions of his European culture were stripped away, he could draw on the Russian customs he had grown up with. His transformation was not unlike the one that takes place in Natasha in the scene in War and Peace when she suddenly discovers in her 'Uncle's' forest cabin that the spirit of the peasant dance is in her blood.
<p>4</p>As readers of War and Peace will know, the war of 1812 was a vital watershed in the culture of the Russian aristocracy. It was a war of national liberation from the intellectual empire of the French - a moment when noblemen like the Rostovs and the Bolkonskys struggled to break free from the foreign conventions of their society and began new lives on Russian principles. This was no straightforward metamorphosis (and it happened much more slowly than in Tolstoy's novel, where the nobles rediscover their forgotten national ways almost overnight). Though anti-French voices had grown to quite a chorus in the first decade of the nineteenth century, the aristocracy was still immersed in the culture of the country against which they were at war. The salons of St Petersburg were filled with young admirers of Bonaparte, such as Pierre Bezukhov in War and Peace. The most fashionable set was that of Counts Rumiantsev and Caulaincourt, the French ambassador in Petersburg, the circle in which Tolstoy's Helene moved. 'How can we fight the French?' asks Count Rostopchin, the Governor of Moscow, in War and Peace. 'Can we arm ourselves
against our teachers and divinities? Look at our youths! Look at our ladies! The French are our Gods. Paris is our Kingdom of Heaven.'91 Yet even in these circles there was horror at Napoleon's invasion, and their reaction against all things French formed the basis of a Russian renaissance in life and art.
In the patriotic climate of 1812 the use of French was frowned upon in the salons of St Petersburg - and in the streets it was even dangerous. Tolstoy's novel captures perfectly the spirit of that time when nobles, who had been brought up to speak and think in French, struggled to converse in their native tongue. In one set it was agreed to ban the use of French and impose a forfeit on those who made a slip. The only trouble was that no one knew the Russian word for 'forfeit' - there was none - so people had to call out 'forfaiture'. This linguistic nationalism was by no means new. Admiral Shishkov, sometime Minister of Public Education, had placed the defence of the Russian language at the heart of his campaign against the French as early as 1803. He was involved in a long dispute with the Karamzinians, in which he attacked the French expressions of their salon style and wanted literary Russian to return to its archaic Church Slavonic roots.* For Shishkov the influence of French was to blame for the decline of the Orthodox religion and the old patriarchal moral code: the Russian way of life was being undermined by a cultural invasion from the West.
Shishkov's stock began to rocket after 1812. Renowned as a card player, he was a frequent guest in the fashionable houses of St Petersburg, and between rounds of vingt-et-un he would preach the virtues of the Russian tongue. Among his hosts, he took on the status of a 'national sage' and (perhaps in part because they owed him gambling debts) they paid him to tutor their sons.92 It became a fashion
